Chapter 14: Skirmish
Haekos could have been going better.
Being suddenly denied access to the dungeons Cato was trying to destroy gave him little choice but to raze the majority of Nexus buildings. At least it was clear there were limitations on the technique that atomized all his bioweapon forces. More, it was obvious that it only affected System-jamming constructs, leaving all his communications and stealth drones intact, which was a weakness he could absolutely exploit in the future.
For the present he just had to hope he could do enough damage to the System to start to collapse or, better, draw out the System-God without commensurate harm to the native populace. Though that was looking less and less likely as the higher ranks were starting to arrive, and they were far less concerned with collateral damage than he was. Or rather, than Kili Frei – née Raine Haekos – was, considering how much of the invasion force she controlled.
“I really do hate this,” Raine said, referring not to the combat but to the huddled groups of low-rankers being herded away from the concentrated chokepoints of System towns — some of which were nonfunctional anyway. It was for their own safety, but it was still ripping people away from their homes and marching them about through force of arms. In a way it was not so unnatural to those within the System, where the threat of violence saturated every dealing, but Cato wasn’t from the System, and Raine and Leese were distant from it by way of deep time. They were not much happier than he was, and had both abandoned their Haekosi bodies in favor of an orbital presence.
“It’s not great,” Cato admitted, really wishing that the System-god would show up so he could just put an end to things. The massive particle beams were in place, ready and waiting for one of the self-proclaimed divine beings, but so far he’d only seen evidence of their action, not their persons.
“Could be worse,” Leese said, who was dealing with the noncombatants in the cities, the young mothers and pre-Copper juveniles, getting them out and away from the line of fire. The shark-like Haekos children were quite adorable, in the way of juveniles everywhere, and Leese was herding the families out into bodies of water where they would be safe.
Despite the obvious affinity for water, the actual System towns were land-oriented, with no real consideration for the physiology of the native Haekos. They’d all been founded on rivers and lakes, however, or on the coasts of the large freshwater seas, so each had a ready waterway along which the amphibious inhabitants could evacuate. Everything he’d seen showed that those within the System were focused on the cities and towns, and to a lesser extent dungeons, and generally didn’t bother with bodies of water at all. Only a tiny set of species were amphibious or otherwise at home in the water, and while that limitation hardly mattered at higher ranks, it was not something the System catered to.
The families were surrounded by a swarm of aquatic warframes keeping the monster fish at bay and providing floating platforms for the Haekos natives. In a worst-case scenario the water surface might serve to blunt the energetic results of orbital weaponry, though he hoped that most of the populace would be well away before that. Most of them were riding – or being forced to ride – warframes just for the sake of speed. Others were being carried, insensate, for their own safety. They were entirely in the right to defend themselves and their families and homes, but Cato didn’t want them to die for a hopeless cause. There were already enough senseless deaths on Cato’s ledger as it was.
So far he’d managed to avoid such casualties on Haekos, as the only orbital weaponry he’d brought into play was the low-powered railguns. But that was not going to last forever, as higher ranks meant he needed to exert more force, and unlike the System he didn’t have a way of mitigating the side effects of energy expenditure. Using Skills, someone could hurl a spear at supersonic velocities and avoid all the collateral damage that kind of launch or impact ought to have. He was restricted to base physics, and thermodynamics offered not a single iota of grace.